WildWays The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

The Wild Ways study combines design research with behaviour-change methodologies and emerged from the award-winning Rewild My Street - urban-rewilding campaign.

Rewild My Street explores how a typical London residential street can be adapted to improve biodiversity, using practice-centred design research to develop and communicate visions for biodiverse cities - and inspire community action to effect change.

Wild Ways aims to understand and influence urban-rewilding behaviour in London’s private residential gardens. This addresses the issue of declining vegetation and biodiversity in urban gardens. Small adaptations to gardens can create significant wildlife habitat, which is vital in a time of increasing urbanisation and ecological crisis. The research follows four stages:

1. A scoping review of the existing literature on urban-rewilding behaviour, coded using the ‘COM-B’ behaviour model;
2. Mixed-methods research to understand the capability, opportunity and motivational factors influencing urban-rewilding behaviour;
3. Development of an intervention strategy to promote urban-rewilding behaviour, using the ‘Behaviour Change Wheel’ framework.
4. Testing of the intervention strategy through Rewild My Street.

This interdisciplinary study is providing new insights for influencing urban-rewilding behaviour, supporting London Met Lab’s ‘Environment Challenge’ and the capital’s status as the world’s first National Park City, and developing a model for cities worldwide.

The study protocol is published in Cities and Health.
The Stage 1 results are published in Cities and Health and its City Know-how blog.

For further details and updates visit the Rewild My Street website and @rewildmystreet on X (former Twitter), Instagram  and YouTube.